James Gurney

This weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

A deep-learning algorithm can tell what you're looking at by scanning your brain. Photo CNN

Now, scientists in Japan report that the same kind of technology can guess what you're looking at from your brain activity alone. The process uses fMRI brain technology, which scans blood flow in the brain in real time.

After a period of training, the system generates a short natural-language caption based on what it supposes you're looking at. Sometimes the captions are right on. For example when a person was looking at the photo to the left, the computer correctly hypothesized that the image showed: A man is playing tennis
on the court with
his racket.

When the guess was a little wrong, it was wrong in an interesting way. Once, when the subject being scanned was looking at a man kayaking on a river, it concluded: A man is surfing in the ocean on his surf board.
Right now the technology is limited by practical issues (the subject has to lie down in a big expensive machine). However, it could become part of an efficient brain-computer interface (BCI), which requires close two-way communication between the user and the machine.

3 comments:

I used to think that technology was going to free up our time to spend pursuing the Arts and restoring our eco-systems- that we all would be able to truly realize our full potential. I could almost see the future where humanity would pursue new knowledge that would be used in such a way it would reflect on what a noble species we had become. The new world would be a garden and we its' artful caretakers.

I understand this new technology, if used responsibly, could be used to help us better understand the brain and how it works. Unfortunately, tech seems to be focused more on control and manipulation. We use our computers to compile data that enable us to do those very tasks in politics and business. We have enough advances in technology now to truly change this world for the better. So, why haven't we? Is it just business as usual?

It would be fascinating to allow this to record descriptions of your dreams. Imagine being able to know what you dreamed the previous night even if you don’t remember it! Or if it could even create a video approximating what the dream was like? Very cool stuff!